These novels are all part of Ursula Le Guin's Hainish cycle and are among her first novels. Rocannon's World, her first novel, seemed too much like Tolkien's Middle Earth overlayed with space opera. In clever ways, but still pretty derivative. The second, Planet of Exile, was still rather conventional, but it was one where the planet's cosmology did do more to drive the plot: this is a planet with a year sixty times longer than our earth about to enter a winter that will last 15 of our years. City of Illusions is a direct sequel to Planet of Exile and was more memorable, had more twists and turns, and delivered along the way a good adventure across a post-apocalyptic far-future America. I can also see her philosophy more to the fore in this book. Le Guin did a translation of the Tao Te Ching, and Taoism is said to imbue both Earthsea and her novel The Dispossessed. A passage in the Tao is key in this story, and we even meet a "Thurro-dowist" (follower of Thoreau of Walden Pond and Taoism.) This is the the first novel here I'd call a standout.
The Left Hand of Darkness is perhaps LeGuin's most famous and influential novel, painting one of the most fascinating and unique of alien worlds. Interspersed through the narrative are myths and legends that give a texture to the cultures central to the tale. This is one of the great science-fiction novels of all time that examines a lot of the issues surrounding gender, prejudice and identity--it's specifically considered one of the great feminist science fiction novels but I don't think it's at all heavy-handed but above all a involving and moving story set in a intriguing world.
I wish I could say the same of the last novel included. I didn't care at all for the preachy The Word for World is Forest. Maybe, just maybe, if Captain Don Davidson whose perspective we open with weren't such a caricature, if he wasn't such a repellant, twirl-the-mustache villain from the very first pages, I could have hung on until what was good in the book took hold. As it was, I felt if I'm was going to experience a tale of how cutting down trees is evil, where the noble, peaceful indigenous people fight back against the rapacious Yumens, well, I'll go watch Avatar again--at least it's pretty. Though the novel won a Hugo though for Best Novella, and is considered one of Le Guin's best works, so it's not a bad choice to round things out.
